We replaced an entire mainframe with a couple of adapters; here’s what happened.
Back in 2011 we needed to replace a legacy mainframe system for a customer. They were in effect acting as a Value Added Network (VAN) in a small industry and needed to completely replace legacy hardware and out of support software; essentially they were trading two types of data, EDI (X12) and a proprietary flat file format. Enough time has passed now that I can blog about it fairly objectively and use it as a case study for how we achieved the deadlines and transitioned this community to a cloud enabled platform. Our strategy for migration had to cope with no documentation and the lack of a test infrastructure for the community.
Your backend system isn’t cloud-ready, that’s not a big deal if you have an adapter.
In our brave new cloud-based world a lot of integration happens over the web via HTTP; for a lot of scenarios, a full WS stack that uses SOAP+UDDI+WSDL is complete overkill and a timesink. Sometimes you just want to send some data around and get a response; this is where the adapter can fit into your integration landscape and help you get things done1.
Sometimes things have to get done and your dirty proof of concept gets deployed into production… ↩︎
In celebration of International Women’s Day (8th March 2013), I think a reference to computing pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper is in order. I believe she said that programming was like planning a dinner; that’s a neat way of mapping the act of programming into something everyday. After all, as a programmer, most of the time you aren’t inventing new algorithms1 you’re just joining up existing third party libraries and API’s in a different way; making a new recipe out of the same ingredients.
Integration is much the same.
To paraphrase Bill Gates, anyone who’s understood all of of Knuth can always get a job. ↩︎
Bridging between SAP and other systems using the adapter framework; part 3
So, this is yet another blog post about executing BAPI functions in SAP using the Adapter Framework; one day I will get bored with writing about SAP, but right now, it’s on the top of the heap. Today’s post is around error handling and reporting; any monkey can make something work, but handling error conditions gracefully is often a stumbling block that can trip you up during integration.
Are you an expert developer if you’ve had n years experience?
I re-watched groundhog day quite recently; it is still a work of genius but it got me to thinking about the subtext of the film and how it relates to software development.